Criterion Blu-ray Film Review

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) • Blu-ray [Criterion Collection]

A documentary about the successful career and assassination of San Francisco’s first elected gay city supervisor.

On the morning of 27 November 1978, a young San Francisco politician called Dan White climbed through a window at City Hall, where he has until recently held an elected position. He went to the office of George Moscone, the mayor, and shot him dead… and then walked through the building to the office of another colleague, Harvey Milk, and killed him too.

Any assassination of a public figure sends shockwaves through their community, but Milk’s was more than averagely traumatic for San Franciscans and for many beyond the Bay Area. He’d been a supervisor (a term for members of San Francisco’s city council) for less than a year, but he was openly gay, and in the 1970s this was almost unheard of in politics. Rob Epstein’s documentary The Times of Harvey Milk briefly illustrates that with a contemporary clipping from the London Daily Telegraph, its headline declaring “Homosexual Elected.”